Agonist
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These tendencies of the times cause the public to be more disposed than at most former periods to prescribe general rules of conduct, and endeavour to make every one conform to the approved standard. And that standard, express or tacit, is to desire nothing strongly. Its ideal of character is to be without any marked…
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[T]he great majority of people lack an intellectual conscience. —Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. —Henry David Thoreau I think not.
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Diana Hsieh’s credulousness extends (about 217 years) too far. Soylent government is people. Plaudits: No Treason
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[Note: this post has been superseded. — Ed.] While wandering the Web back in 1997, I came across Michael Huemer’s Why I Am Not an Objectivist (WIANO hereafter). I was impressed by what I then called “[T]he first reasoned (and reasonable) critique of Objectivism I [had] ever read.” At the time, I considered myself an…
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Philosophizing is antisocial, perhaps the most perfectly antisocial activity possible, easily beating out murder. Even I will readily admit, however, that man is a social animal. Small wonder, then, that philosophy is most popular among those constitutionally incapable of engaging in it. Those who philosophize risk alienation, solipsism, exile, poisoning, poverty, passion, horror, ennui, and,…
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Imagine this: you wake up one day, and realize you are in an insane asylum. Shortly, you put it together that you’ve been here all your life. There are several reasons why it had been difficult to recognize your situation: The inmates and the staff in this asylum dress and act alike, and it is…
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Julian Sanchez seems to have become a propagandist for naturalism. I have much to say on compatibilism (the most irksome of the naturalists’ talking points) and the phenomenon, almost unbelievable to me, that there are such creatures as compatibilists. None of it is complimentary. Let me go on record now: compatibilism is not a respectable…
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Among some Objectivists I have noted a fetishistic obsession with finality in arbitration, and I have been well-disposed to them for that, for this unlikely obsession reveals something quite … miraculous. Sublimated Christianity, it appears, was inadvertently taken up into the Objectivist corpus as Ayn Rand breathed life into it in the mid-1950s. Well, I’m…
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Earlier this month, Diana Hsieh posted a nice little jab at the profession of philosophy. Her title is a bit of a misnomer, as not all the points of mockery are apropos to “analytic” philosophers. That said, professional philosophers, be they the get of Wittgenstein or the spawn of Heidegger, deserve a great deal more…
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I had two thoughts on my mind just now. First one, then the other. Both of them seemed like good blog topics, and as I sat down to write on the second, I realized they’re connected, and interestingly so. First, I was thinking about philosophy and how it affects me, and why I avoid it…